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ISIS Mobile Wallet / Google Wallet / iPhone Mobile Payment

Yesterday when I was checking out at the Wholefood Market, I was delightfully surprised by their new NFC-enabled reader. At the top of the screen, it said “Swipe/Tap Your Card/Phone”. According to the excited cashier, I was the first one using my phone to pay.

ISIS Mobile Wallet has been available since November 2013. Jamba Juice was chosen as the main promotion partner; a free drink for payment made with ISIS. Jamba Juice was committed to give away one million drinks. For a while, I was having Jamba Juice every day. What a treat!

James D. White, chairman, president and CEO of Jamba Inc., in a company press release, said “Facilitating 1 million transactions through the mobile wallet over the last seven months confirms that the era mobile commerce has arrived. I am proud that Jamba has been able to serve as a leader in the space”.

I appreciate their leadership for this emerging technology.

There are many discussions about Apple’s potential mobile payment and the possibility of an NFC-enabled iPhone 6. I think it might be helpful to describe two approaches to implement an NFC mobile payment. If you want more technical information, please check out the details in this Android page.

I. SIM based Secure Element (SE):

In order to be able to use ISIS mobile payment, you need to get an ISIS SIM card from your service provider. The SIM card includes a Secure Element (SE) that contains your credentials.

When an NFC Reader is tapped by an NFC device, the NFC Controller routes traffic to the SE for authentication.

This approach is very secure because it is difficult to hack the SIM card.

The NFC card is emulated using HCE. When an NFC Reader is tapped by a device, the data is routed to the host CPU. This approach uses the credentials that are stored in a remote server for authentication.

HCE is considered to be a threat to the SIM-based SE and is adopted in various NFC secure applications.

Now the questions is “When iPhone adopts NFC, which mobile payment approach will it choose?”